Last weekend the WXC World Racing and UK teams joined up for a pre-season break in the Scottish borders. There were 18 girls aged 14 to 40s staying at the Rock Uk adventure centre in Newcastleton for a fun, wet and soggy weekend of mountain biking, activities and team building.
The first bit of excitement and laughter came with being presented with our new 2011 kit, with some awesome spotty skinsuits I can safely say you won’t miss the World Racing team this year! Joolze Dymond was on hand for some pro style photo-shoots as we tried to ignore the rain and cold, stop giggling, look the right direction etc – slightly chaotic but lots of fun!
wxc uk squad
Of course there was plenty of cycling – a night ride, a long group ride with a warming coffee shop stop, action shot photo-shoot rides, and even some pain drills. The trails were wet, it rained most of time, it was pretty cold, yet we all had a brilliant time. It was great to see so many girls out on mountain bikes, watch out for some team podium domination this year, standards were high!
team ride
After riding the action continued each evening with outdoor activities and team building games. One particularly fun activity was being zipped inside a giant inflated plastic ball that floated onto the swimming pool – balancing, staggering and finally running on water ended up an being a hilarious extreme leg workout.
blow up balls!
good balancing skills
Thanks to WXC for a great weekend. Also to the RockUK, Joolze for the photographs, and the SIP events crew for showing us their trails.
Next up, in a moment of maddness yesterday I signed up for the Andalucia Bike Race in Spain. With stages of 60-80km and 1-2000m of climbing for 6 days, it looks pretty hardcore. I’ll be riding in the mixed pair category with Josh Ibbett of the Torq Performance team and it starts next weekend…!